toucanBox is a monthly subscription, delivering hands-on arts, crafts and experiments to inspire and teach children aged three to eight.

As part of our brand identity we want to involve children in the development of our projects to ensure they are stimulated and challenged by each craft. We decided to reach out to local schools to establish links that could benefit both us and them.

We host arts and craft sessions in schools to test our product, encouraging feedback and monitoring involvement and engagement.

Schools are also a rich source of gaining potential customers, so we designed a marketing campaign to encourage parents to sign up to our service and, by doing so, earning money for their school. For every new customer we offered £5 to the school to spend how they wish.

These links led us to become more involved with the PTA and 'friends of the school' groups, offering support and entertainment when they arranged fetes where we could present our brand to parents, showcasing the toucanBox experience and explaining what we are all about. Because our subscription service is rather unique, this was a valuable opportunity to discuss the benefits of our product, while providing kids with fun challenges, crafts and games.

We saw our customer base increase by 20% in the month following implementing these ideas, but it has also had a huge impact at making potential customers aware of our brand. We're now looking further afield to work with more schools.